10 BREWING & BEVERAGE INDUSTRIES BUSINESS A few days ago, while in the midst of preparing dinner, I popped open a can of pale ale. It was a local brand I knew from experience to be quite good, but had only previously enjoyed from the tap or bottle. The canned version was a recent addition to the brewery’s portfolio. Like so many North American pale ales and IPAs these days, it poured cloudy, quite cloudy, in fact. In deference to the beer’s lovely, fruity aromatics, however, I overlooked its turbidity – often a source of significant irritation – and focused instead on its quenching character and the next few stages of my menu preparation. Then, sometime later, I completed my prep and turned to take another sip of my beer, and was stopped in my tracks. The beer in my pint glass, which I had sipped to about one-third to one-half empty, looked decidedly odd, even foreboding. Instead of an appetizing ale, there was a foamless, coppery-orange liquid with all the clarity of extra-pulp Tropicana orange juice mixed with unfiltered apple juice. It was, in a word, a mess. Further still, and compounding its sins, I knew for a fact that it was an intentional mess. In conversation with one of the brewery’s founders not that much earlier, he had admitted to me that they were using flour and other substances to increase the cloudiness of the beer. While he had not mentioned this specific brand by name, it was easy enough to deduce from the appearance of my pint that this was one beer so adulterated. To which I ask: Why? Trends in brewing come and go, it’s true. It was not that long ago I was bemoaning the proliferation of fruit IPAs – even taking the practice to task in an essay for my and Tim Webb’s new book, the Pocket Beer Guide, 3rd Edition – but these oft- unbalanced mash-ups appear now to be falling out of favour. And few brewery industry denizens should need reminding of the greatest rise and fall of all, that of the original global beer style, porter. Yet even so, it is rare that a trend or fad can take down entire breweries with it, although I fear that may well be the result should super-cloudy beers eventually run their course, as they almost certainly will. Many is the brewery these days that has created an entire portfolio of beers that are, if not actually based upon their turbidity, then at least heavily characterised by it. Which is of course fine so long as such fashion continues, but raises several interesting scenarios when it does not. Take Joe’s Brewing Company, for instance, whose brands run the gamut from Cloudy as Hell Pale Ale to Can’t See Through This Double IPA. Joe’s is doing well now, with haziness and cloudiness all the rage, but once drinkers encounter one too many such ales that have developed off-flavours from sitting too long on the shelf and decide that perhaps there is something appealing about clarity after all, what is Joe to do? Were it one brand alone that Joe had used to climb aboard the turbidity train, it could be easily and quietly be dropped and the brewery soldier on. But with an entire portfolio of cloudiness, Joe faces a choice of continuing to wave high the flag of murkiness, even against the drift of popular opinion, reformulating all of his brands to relative clarity – and in so doing admit the falsehood inherent in his long- standing defence of there being “a lot of flavour in that haziness!” – or retooling his entire brewery and essentially starting again from scratch. Granted, Joe’s is but a fictional brewery, however many very real ones may someday soon find themselves in the exact same position. And as alluded to above, in the shorter term, fashion should be only one of their worries. Two years ago, around the outset of cloudy beer-mania, I wrote a column about the steadily increasing turbidity of IPAs for Canada’s national newspaper, for which I interviewed a respected and successful veteran Montréal brewer, Ellen Bounsall, and Dr. Michael Lewis, professor emeritus of brewing science at the University of California at Davis. In the view of the former, cloudy beer was itself a bit of a minefield in that it “could have beer-spoiling bacteria lurking inside,” while Dr. Lewis was of the mind that “putting beers on the market that are deliberately hazy – or, worse, accidentally hazy – (is) a risky sales strategy because it might signal not so much ‘craft’ as ‘incompetence.’” Of course, Bounsall and Lewis could both be wrong and/or the fashion for murkiness may continue indefinitely. But given the very real possibility that they are right and also that the trend will eventually pass, the choice of whether or not to go ‘all in’ on cloudiness would seem to be, ahem, clear. Stephen Beaumont Letter From North America STEPHEN BEAUMONT Cloudy, Cloudier, Cloudiest A professional beer writer for 27 years, Stephen Beaumont is the author or co-author of a dozen books on beer, including the new, recently released third edition of The Pocket Beer Book, and 2016’s fully-revised and updated second edition of The World Atlas of Beer, both co-written with Tim Webb. Stephen’s latest solo book is The Beer & Food Companion, which was published to much critical and commercial acclaim in October of 2015. Stephen has also contributed to several other books and written innumerable features, articles and columns for publications as varied at The Globe and Mail and Playboy, Fine Cooking and Whisky Advocate. When not writing, he travels the world extensively, tracking down newbreweries and hosting beer dinners and tastings from São Paulo, Brazil, to Helsinki, Finland, and Beijing, China, to Seattle, Washington. Visit http://beaumontdrinks.com 10_Layout 1 10/11/2017 08:11 Page 1